Pollux
a planet or angle in close conjunction with the fixed star Pollux
What the tradition reads
Pollux, marking the head of the southern twin in Gemini, is given the nature of Mars alone in the older assignment, though Alvidas instead reads it as the Moon, Mars and Uranus together. Robson's reading of the star's influence leans hard into its Mars flavoured character: a subtle, crafty, spirited, brave, audacious, cruel and rash nature, a love of boxing specifically named among its gifts, together with what Robson calls a dignified malevolence and a connection to poisons, an unusually specific and unflattering pairing of talents for a star this bright and this well known. The tradition's reading of courage and combativeness follows the mythological figure the star is named for directly, Pollux being remembered above all else for his skill and reputation as a boxer, so that the star's own promise of audacity and physical bravery is read as inherited quite literally from the twin it commemorates rather than assembled from the planetary mixture alone. Because the reading names cruelty and poison alongside courage and dignity, a contact with Pollux is generally treated as promising real physical and competitive strength that the tradition insists comes bundled with a harder, more dangerous edge rather than as pure, uncomplicated valour.
The story
Pollux was, in the fuller telling of the Dioscuri myth, the immortal son of Zeus, set apart from his twin Castor, son of a mortal father, by that one difference in parentage alone; the twins were raised together regardless and became inseparable companions, famed alike for horsemanship and, in Pollux's own particular case, for skill in boxing, a talent the myth credits to him personally rather than to the pair equally. When Castor was killed, Pollux refused the immortality that would have kept him alone in the company of the gods and asked instead to share it with his dead brother, and the gods granted the request, in the version fixed permanently overhead, by setting the two together as the twin stars of Gemini, so that the mortal brother's death was, in effect, undone by the immortal brother's loyalty. That the tradition should read Pollux himself as audacious, combative and touched by a kind of dignified malevolence fits a figure whose own defining act was neither restraint nor gentleness but a fierce, almost reckless refusal to accept a separation from his brother that any lesser loyalty would have simply allowed to stand.
Written from
Corpus key star:Pollux.